Vola celebrates 50 years of uncompromising Danish design

In 1968, Vola made the original modern-day tap, pioneering an iconic design that has remained classic, timeless and desirable ever since.

To mark the occasion, the Danish brand has made a series of short films to celebrate the company and its values and to capture its unique approach.

The six films shine a spotlight on Vola’s achievements, people and products and bring them to a new generation of architects and interior designers, continuing the legacy of Vola and early collaborator Arne Jacobsen.

The first film in the series, Form and Function takes viewers back to 1968 when Verner Overgaard, the founder of Vola invited architect and fellow Dane Arne Jacobsen to collaborate on a groundbreaking design project.

Both were passionate about craftsmanship, modernity, proportion and detail. The resulting iconic shape of the mixer tap that they created together set the stage for Vola’s half-century of product innovation, based on geometric precision and minimalistic design.

In turn, this led to Vola’s current day design ethos, illustrated by the original HV1 bathroom basin mixer in which precise and pure design have both evolved – beneath its circular and cylindrical forms, the HV1 has hidden workings, creating elegance and flexibility. It’s a design that is widely copied but never matched.

Torben Madsen of Link Arkitektur, the studio that has guided contemporary Vola product design for the past decade, describes their work as “an ongoing conversation with Jacobsen’s ideals, a search for meaning that builds on the rhythm, form and poetry of the originals”.

There was no compromise in Jacobsen’s design and that’s a legacy Vola is following today: each new product can trace its lineage back to 1968, demonstrating how the consistency of form and function underpins the best modern design.